Page 36 of How to Get Even

‘Of course,’ Ali replied with such seriousness that it was clear they had done this before.

And just like that, Bella and Chase were being rushed out of the booths with, ‘Have a good night,’ being yelled at them as Maurice and Ali disappeared upstairs to where the karaoke rooms were.

‘Well, that was abrupt,’ Bella observed as she picked up her coat. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’

‘We’ve been here before. And I had to learn the hard way. You got off easy,’ he accused, turning to pick up the end of her coat sleeve so that she could slip her arm into it more easily. Caught a little off guard, she shrugged into the coat and for a second she thought he might try and settle it around her shoulders, but he stepped back.

It was that precise moment that Bella realised she and Chase lived opposite each other and that they would basically be going home together.

No. Not home!

Just back. To the complex.

She swallowed, wondering if he was thinking the same thing or whether he’d realised just a little sooner than she had.

‘Do you want to share a cab?’ he asked, hesitating.

Did she want to be in an enclosed space with him, in the dark, late at night?

‘I’d like to walk some of that meal off, but if you?—’

‘No, a walk would be good,’ he said, nodding, not meeting her eye. ‘Unless you had somewhere else you needed to be?’

‘Yes, that’s me. The secret party girl of Upstate New York,’ she said wryly.

‘I reckon the papers would have done an exposé on that already, had that been the case.’

Bella smiled, bitterness pulling at her lips. ‘They’ve managed to do so much with what they’ve already had.’

Given what he’d read when he was looking her up online, Chase knew what she meant. He pushed open the door to the restaurant and waited for her to pass him before following her out into the cold.

‘Though it’s not a bad image,’ he admitted as they came onto a quiet sidewalk, now that most people were already where they wanted to be.

‘What?’ Bella asked, the word a puff of white in the darkness of the evening.

‘You as a secret party girl,’ he said, smiling at what he saw in his mind’s eye. ‘I bet you wait until everyone’s in bed, pull on a load of black clothing, some Doc Martens and go raving.’

Bella let out a laugh that half sounded as if it were against her will, and he was slightly delighted. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his long wool coat and tried to ignore the way that warmth began to spread from somewhere that had been cold for a very long time.

‘Raving?’

‘Yeah, you know. Sweaty club, angry music, full rage against the machine,’ he growled out into the night.

She laughed again and she really had to stop doing that because…

‘Dye my hair black? Never.’ She shuddered as if the thought were more appalling than the current frigid temperature of a New York winter’s night.

‘I don’t know. I can see it,’ he said, tilting his head to find the angle to make it work. And he could. Startlingly pale skin, raven’s-wing black hair and eyes like silver moons.

She looked at him as if trying to see what he saw. Trying to see that image of herself in his eyes and he knew he should shut it down.

They turned their backs on Harlem and Fifth Avenue, hugging the side of Central Park, and a comfortable silence settled between them.

‘So, you don’t have any messy stories about getting into trouble as a kid after raiding your parents’ alcohol cupboard?’ he asked, hoping that the tease in his tone softened the jibe.

A shadow passed across her gaze before disappearing.

‘Ahh, no. No, that wasn’t really… That wasn’t what my childhood was like.’

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